Monday, February 27, 2012

Happy 40th Birthday, Glam Rock! My 1972 Diary

Happy 40th, Glam Rock! My 1972 Diary

I wrote my first diary in 1972. Each day had four lines and I struggled to
fill them all. Mostly I commented on whether or not I had homework or exams and how
much I hated my teachers. (Still do. I'd cheerfully swing for three of
four of them, to this day, forty years on.) I believe I was being terse in the
diary as I knew my mother would find it and read it. In my other writing I was quite
effusive. At the time I was inventing my own world, as kids do, and drawing the
maps and inventing the languages to go with it. But the diary doesn't exactly brand me as a budding
Pepys. I remember my rationale was to write just enough to remind me of the day's emotions. I wonder what I'd have done now
with Facebook… instead of swearing at Dinner Ladies and getting detention I'd probably be fulminating against the entire lot of
them in rich Yorkshire dialect.

That year saw some major power cuts due to miners' strikes, or at least due to the government response to them (i.e. make people suffer until they hate the miners and pressure them to come back to work). My parents were Tories and happily bigoted about all sorts of people and things, some of which rubbed off on me at that age and some of which luckily didn't.

I'll stick to the relevant things here. Marc Bolan, Glam Rock and Marc-associated
hippiephilia. Oh, and homework and how
much I hated my teachers.

Best of T. Rex, the second Flyback reissue, catalog # TON 2. Also, my diary, a Marc Bolan
special that I think I'll scan in as part of this series, and a scrapbook that is probably too
damaged to do anything with. The world was not overflowing with acid-free paper and archival
glues in 1972, particularly not for a fairly poor teenager.

So far in 1972 I've missed:

January 1st.

Still carrying on the great D. Went to Bradford and got
Sleepy Shores finally. [Bruv] came.

[I can't remember what the Great Deception (of my parents) was but it wasn't drugs or sex. Most probably having a friend who
was Catholic, Irish, or even gasp! an Irish
Catholic. "Sleepy
Shores" was a terrible piano tune by Johnny Pearson. My dad loved it.
It was the soundtrack to Owen, M.D.]

January 4th.

Went to Heck[mondwike] looking for Lord of the Rings. Would
have gone to Dews[bury] but it was closed.
Neither Ride A White Swan nor LOTR.

[Towns used to close for half a day
during the week. Dewsbury probably still does.]

January 15th.

Went to Leeds. Got Flyback 2. Tres good. Must remember to
write letter to Marc at the address I know.

[That's the vinyl record pictured above and below, taken today.]

[Look, the writing in the diary matches my nitpicky corrections to the track listing on the
record. Is that 'provenance' and does it make this cheap reissue worth something? Alas I
rather doubt it.]

Listened to Fragile. We keep getting power cuts. Made a T.
Rex scrapbook.

[If any of that book is salvageable, and it most likely isn't,
I'll post it on the blog.]

February 19th.

Had chicken and chips at Hart's Head, Giggleswick.

[I was
half starved as a kid, and chicken and chips was one of the biggest treats I
could imagine.]

February 20th.

Walked halfway to Horton over top. Played in quarry. Very
cold went home to a power cut.

[The quarries are a little bigger now than they were then, but you get the picture. Walking miles over
clints and bottomless peat bogs to run around in the blasting areas of the limestone quarries and
play in the blue chemical pools at their bottoms. Ah, seventies childhood. I gather it isn't like that
nowadays.]

February 22nd.

Got TON 2 [Best of T. Rex, Flyback 2] back at last. [Where had it been? I forgot to write that down.]

February 23rd.

Vicky lent me 'Beard of Stars'. Great. I like Organ Blues.

[Budding rock critic here, I can tell. My favorite writers at the time were Charles Shaar Murray and Mick Farren. I think they did a better job than I did.]

February 25th. [This was a Friday, the day the miners' strike
ended. Not that I put that in my diary.]

The rock they were processing in "our" quarry wasn't the limestone, that was up at Horton. Our Quarry was processing the rock underlying the limestone - remember the "unconformity" that was in the Observer book of Geology. It is a "phyllite" and is a type of slightly metamorphised shale or mudstone. I think it falls into the Aluminium Silicate family and due to its relative hardness it is used for the chippings that are rolled into the bitumen they spray on the roads when they can't afford to do a proper resurfacing job!!! It's marvellous what you can recall when you really try.

All the pools in all three quarries were the same blue though. I remember dad gaily calling "Blue Lagoon!" every time we passed one as though it was an exciting tropical Elvis movie or something, rather than a scene that might have featured as Mordor in Lord of the Rings.

Also, I thought the Craven Unconformity was the layer of slate on top of the limestone, not what was under the limestone. But I'm not a geologist by any stretch of the imagination so I'm willing to be corrected.

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I share a house with a bunch of geckos, a chameleon and approximately seven goldfish. The largest and dumbest goldfish is called John Galt. I can't remember why. Friend me on LiveJournal here. Friend me on Facebook here.